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Introduction Instructor’s Note
Welcome to the world we have made. You are free to commune with us between our pages. Know though that the ideas held within will only hold meaning to you if you are ready and willing to be moved by them. Nothing here is static or promised; nothing here wishes to obey. Imagination and a keen eye turned inward toward the self are the price of the ticket for admission. The trace of the world we collectively established in my course, “The Pieces of Toni Morrison” can be found here, within this multi-voiced talking book. The chorus formed by the pieces my students submitted to this talking textbook sings in the future anterior tense: what stories and poems will we have read, what emotions will we have felt, what norms will we have abandoned, what art will we have made, what people will we have become in order to experience the ecstatic responsibility of freedom and the vibrant, curious self-awareness of love? The purpose of the class and this book is the same: to offer an alternative narrative of the self, one which may only be accessed through a complete internal transformation. Through the semester-long process of writing, teaching, learning, listening, feeling, and talking together, we have all become strange to ourselves. My hope is that the testimonies recorded in this book will give you the courage to do the same. I did not expect the class to conclude this way. In the spring of 2020 as I developed the early drafts of this course, I was still allowing myself to be guided by an algorithm of deeply internalized racism and sexism. Though I never would have admitted it at the time, my primary goal in designing “The Pieces of Toni Morrison” was to advocate for her inclusion into a blindingly and stultifyingly white male canon of critical theory and philosophy. I intended to force the broad complexity of her mind’s excursions through the narrow interpretive sieves named by Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, and others. I was going to convince my students that Morrison really was a semiotician, a psychoanalyst, a philosopher, a Marxist, and a literary critic. I was pitifully excited to assimilate Morrison into a system of thought that I knew had stifled my own creativity and made me doubt the value of my own experiences as a Black woman writer and intellectual. Why? Why suffer and perform in my own classroom, a place where the tyranny of the Father was purportedly absent? At that time, I was aggressively committed to being unaware of the pain of assimilation that was quickly, quietly, and surely killing me. And then Death came. Not for me, shockingly, but for someone who was a mirror to myself. I say she is my sister, but the stories attached to our skin do not hear my plea. She was white. I am Black. She was called Alexa, but believed that Antigone was her true name. Between us there was communion, the creation of new stories about ourselves that exceeded the narratives of our skin, our names, and our most painful memories. Like communion in the sacred sense, I took her body and blood inside of me in order to be born anew. She took my body
